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**All text in red was added when a better way (for me) was found.**

When involved in a website competition, one must worry about votes. The goal of the competition is to have the website that gets the most votes. If you just sit around and do not advertise your site, you will not get many votes.
Not Good!

All competitors come to depend on vote exchangers (VEers). They play a crucial role in advancing in competition, but before you worry about gaining VEers, you need to start a reminder group. Most competitors have two; one for daily reminders and one for weekly reminders. This is the easiest way to let your VEers know where they can go to vote for you. You may want to make a VE page for your site and have places for people to join your groups. (Some people use their email address book to keep track of VEers... groups cannot always be trusted. They may be down for hours, or go completely nuts and lose all of your information.)
I found out that address books are not trustworthy. A lot of my VE buddies have lost all the addresses in their books before. It is best to keep a hard copy (on paper) of at least everyone's email addresses. That way, if you lose your information, you can still email your VEers for the information you lost. Moral: Do not rely on technology!

Next thing you need to do is find a place to post a link to your site asking for VEers. There are many VE boards out there and the competition you are in should have a place for everyone to post their links. You can visit other sites on that board, and if you like them, email them or sign their guestbooks... asking to VE. Some sites may have a VE request form for you to fill out. You just need to look around.
Blind voting is frowned upon, so please visit every site before asking, or agreeing to exchange votes.

After someone agrees to VE with you, or you agree to VE with them, you need to get some information from them. You will figure out a way that is best for you, but I make a simple text file with the following information:
  • Name - The name of the site owner.
  • Site Name - The name of the site you are VEing with.
  • Site URL - The URL of the site you are VEing with.
  • Email for Reminders - The site owner's email for reminders.
  • Daily or Weekly - Which list, daily or weekly, that VEer is subscribed to.
  • Roster URL - The link to that person's team roster.
  • One-Stop - The one-stop voting page that person has made.

    • I use the roster/one-stop links to vote from. If you have at least one of these, it doesn't really matter what team they are on.
Always make sure the person you are VEing with is on one of your reminder lists!
Please keep in mind that some people may be competing in photo contests and not necessarily website competitions.
I suggest keeping a hard copy (on paper) of all of this information in case your computer crashes... or at least on disk!
Disks are not that trustworthy either. You definitely need to write at least an email address down. Just recently, the disk that contained all of my VE info crashed. I couldn't access a thing. I am still scrambling to regain all the info. Moral: Hard copies are best!

If you prefer daily reminders, a good idea might be to create an email account to receive reminders in. VE lists can get long and all those daily reminders can clog up your inbox.
Keep all links handy in case someone forgets to send their reminder one day.

I prefer weekly reminders so I have a folder in my email that I keep voting links in. I vote from this folder every day!
I make a secret page on my site that lists all the sites I VE with, along with their roster and one-stop links. It makes it easier to find the person if they forget to send a reminder.

When emailing someone, after both parties have agreed to VE, I like to use a form in order to get all of the information I need from that person. It looks like this:

Name:
Site Name:
Site URL:
Email for Reminders:
Daily or Weekly:
Roster URL:
One-Stop:
Banner URL:

I send this to the site owner and ask them to fill it out and I also add all of my information, in the above form, at the bottom of my email. When they send the information back I write it down on my sheet and invite them to whichever group they prefer.
(Note: Some groups, such as notifylist.com do not allow you to invite people.)

When sending your reminders, DO NOT forget to add your voting link. I know it may sound dumb, seeing as that's what the group is for in the first place, but I have written a message to my group before and totally left the link out.
Some reminder groups wait a while before sending messages... or get busy and do not send your messages at all.
Send your reminders a day early!
I cannot stress this enough. There's nothing worse than your VE friends not being able to vote for you. Plus, some people like to get early reminders for several reasons:
  • They may have to vote early in the morning due to work or school and you may send your reminders out in the middle of the day.
  • Some people like to confirm that you are competing that week.

If you go on leave of absence (LOA), let your VEers know. Loyal voters (not everyone is a loyal voter, be careful) like to vote for their people every day and will get worried if they do not hear from you. Most people will go so far as to try and hunt you down in the rosters to vote for you.

**I will add things to this ALL the time! I find new and better ways of doing things every day, and when I do... I'll add them here!**